Maintenance & contractors

A strata scheme's maintenance workload rarely stops — there's always something being reported, quoted, approved or chased up. Keeping that moving without a shared view usually means the same three questions get asked in every committee meeting: what's still outstanding, who's dealing with it, and how much is it going to cost.

What a job moves through

• An issue is raised, with a description, location and any photos
• Quotes are requested and compared against each other
• A quote is approved, within whatever spend authority applies
• A work order is issued to the contractor
• An invoice comes in once the work is done
• The job is closed out with a record of the final cost

Why a board view helps

Seeing every job's current stage in one place means the committee isn't relying on someone's memory of "where that got up to." A new committee member, or a manager brought in to help, can see the full state of maintenance without a briefing.

What it isn't

The maintenance board tracks jobs, quotes, invoices and spend approvals against those specific jobs — it isn't a budgeting or cashbook tool. Overall budget tracking, levy funding of maintenance works and bank reconciliation remain part of the full Strata Pages product, not Flex Strata.

Keeping a clean history

Every job stays attached to the building's record once closed, including who approved it and what it eventually cost. That history is genuinely useful later — when a similar issue recurs, or when a new committee wants to know how a previous repair was handled and by whom.

Committees that skip straight from "we need this fixed" to "pay the invoice" lose the ability to compare options or catch cost creep before it happens. Working through quotes, work orders and invoices in sequence closes that gap.

Quotes

Before committing to a contractor, most non-trivial jobs are worth getting more than one quote for. Comparing quotes side by side — scope, price, timeframe — gives the committee a defensible basis for its decision, which matters if an owner later questions why a particular contractor was chosen.

Work orders

Once a quote is accepted, a work order formalises what's been agreed: the scope, the contractor, the price and any conditions. This is the reference point if a dispute arises later about what was actually agreed to be done.

Invoices

When the work is finished, the invoice is recorded against the work order it relates to, so the final cost can be checked against the quoted price rather than taken at face value. Any variance — extra work, delays, additional materials — is visible rather than buried in a lump sum.

Why sequencing matters

• It creates a paper trail justifying the spend if it's ever questioned
• It surfaces variations from the original quote instead of hiding them in the final number
• It gives incoming committee members a clear history of what was done, by whom, and for how much

What Flex Strata does and doesn't do here

Flex Strata tracks the quote, work order and invoice for each maintenance job, and the approvals attached to them. It does not process payments, reconcile bank accounts or manage levy funding of works — those functions remain in the full Strata Pages product used by managers and self-managing bodies corporate handling their own accounts.

Choosing a contractor is a decision the committee will occasionally need to justify — to owners, to a new committee, or to an insurer if something goes wrong on site.

Before engaging anyone

• Confirm they hold the appropriate trade licence for the work
• Sight current public liability insurance (and workers' compensation cover where relevant) rather than taking their word for it
• Check references or recent work if it's a significant job or a new relationship
• Compare at least two or three quotes for anything beyond routine small jobs

Keeping evidence, not just a gut feel

A committee that can point to "we checked their licence, sighted current insurance, compared three quotes and picked the best value one" is in a much stronger position than one that says "we've always used them." That evidence matters if a job goes wrong, if an owner disputes the choice, or if an insurer asks questions after an incident.

Ongoing relationships

Contractors used repeatedly for a building — a cleaner, a gardener, a lift servicer — still need their insurance and licensing checked periodically, since cover can lapse without the committee noticing unless someone's tracking expiry dates.

How the contractor register helps

Flex Strata's contractor register holds each contractor's details, licence information, insurance cover and expiry dates, and job history with the building in one place. Instead of trusting memory or a folder of certificates that's gone stale, the committee can see at a glance whether a contractor's cover is current before issuing them a new work order.

A word of caution

No system replaces judgement — checking a box that insurance was "sighted" once doesn't mean it's still current a year later. Treat the register as a prompt to re-check, not a substitute for occasionally asking a contractor directly for an updated certificate of currency.

Insurance cover that's lapsed without anyone noticing is one of the more expensive mistakes a committee can make, usually only discovered when it's too late to matter — after an incident on site.

Why this needs tracking, not just filing

A certificate of currency sighted at the start of a relationship doesn't stay current forever. Contractors' policies renew annually (or more often lapse and get renewed late), and a committee relying on a PDF from eighteen months ago has no real idea whether cover is still in place today.

What the contractor register tracks

• Licence type and number, where relevant to the trade
• Public liability (and workers' compensation, where applicable) insurance cover
• Expiry dates for both licensing and insurance
• Job history with the building, so patterns of reliability are visible over time

How this changes day-to-day decisions

Before issuing a new work order, the committee (or whoever's coordinating maintenance) can check the register rather than digging through old emails to find the last certificate someone was sent. If cover has lapsed or is about to, that's visible before the job is issued, not after.

What still needs a human check

The register is only as good as the information entered into it — if a renewed certificate isn't uploaded, the register won't magically know cover is current. Building a habit of asking for an updated certificate at renewal time, and logging it promptly, is what actually keeps the register useful.

Beyond insurance

Compliance isn't only about contractors — the building itself carries compliance obligations (fire safety, essential services checks, and similar), which sit in Flex Strata's separate compliance register rather than the contractor register, since they belong to the building rather than to a tradesperson.

Every scheme has some limit on what a committee (or an individual on it) can spend without going back to owners, whether set out explicitly in a by-law or scheme rule, or simply agreed informally. Formalising it avoids arguments after the fact about whether a spend was authorised.

Typical structures

• A small, routine spend limit that an individual (often the chair or a nominated member) can approve alone, for minor and urgent items
• A middling range that needs full committee approval, generally recorded as a decision at a meeting or via a proper committee resolution
• Anything above the committee's own approval authority, which needs an owners' resolution at a general meeting, since committees typically can't bind owners to spending beyond their delegated authority

Why documenting the threshold matters

Without an agreed threshold, arguments tend to surface after the money's spent rather than before — someone assumed they had authority to approve a $15,000 job that really needed a full committee decision, or worse, an owners' resolution. Having a clear, written threshold removes the ambiguity before it becomes a dispute.

How this is recorded in Flex Strata

Spend approvals are attached to the specific job they relate to, recording who approved it and against what authority. This means the maintenance board doubles as an audit trail — if an owner questions a spend later, the committee can show exactly who approved it, when, and under what threshold, rather than relying on someone's recollection.

Setting your own threshold

Flex Strata doesn't set a threshold for you — that's a decision for the committee based on your scheme's by-laws or rules, and often confirmed at an AGM. Once agreed, record it clearly so every committee member and the treasurer are working from the same number.

Most strata legislation and scheme rules recognise that some repairs genuinely can't wait for the next scheduled decision point — a burst pipe or a safety hazard doesn't pause for an agenda.

What generally counts as urgent

• A risk to safety of residents, visitors or the public
• Something actively causing further property damage the longer it's left
• A compliance failure with an immediate legal consequence, such as a serious fire safety fault

What still needs to happen, even in an emergency

• Whoever authorises the emergency work should still record what was authorised and why, even if that record is created just after the event rather than before it
• The rest of the committee should be told as soon as practicable, not at the next scheduled meeting weeks later
• The job should still go through quotes where circumstances allow — "urgent" doesn't always mean "no time to get even one comparison," though sometimes it genuinely does

Recording it after the fact

Because Flex Strata's maintenance board isn't limited to jobs that started with a quote request, an emergency job can be logged with the work order and any available quote attached retrospectively, keeping the same audit trail as a routine job even though the sequence happened out of order under time pressure.

Reporting back to owners

Owners are generally entitled to know about significant emergency expenditure, even if it happened without prior owner approval — most schemes handle this by reporting it at the next meeting along with the reasoning for treating it as urgent. Being upfront about the decision, rather than letting it surface informally, heads off suspicion that a large spend was mishandled.

When it's not actually urgent

Committees sometimes stretch "urgent" to avoid the friction of getting proper approval for something that could reasonably have waited for a quote comparison or a committee meeting. It's worth being honest with yourselves about which category a repair genuinely falls into — the reasoning holds up much better later if it does.

Reactive maintenance is more expensive over time than planned maintenance, mostly because problems caught early are cheaper to fix than problems caught after they've caused secondary damage.

Why committees end up reactive

Without a shared view of what's coming up, maintenance naturally becomes a response to complaints rather than a plan. Nobody notices a lift service is overdue until it breaks down, or that the roof hasn't been inspected in years until a leak appears.

Building a lighter-weight plan

• Use compliance register due dates (essential services checks, and similar recurring obligations) as anchor points for a maintenance calendar
• Track recurring items — gutters, common area painting, lift servicing — even if there's no formal legal requirement attached
• Review the maintenance board's closed job history periodically to spot repeat issues that might indicate an underlying problem worth addressing properly rather than patching repeatedly

A sensible starting point

Most committees don't need a formal, funded long-term maintenance plan to get real value from planning ahead — even an informal list of "things we know are coming" reviewed once or twice a year meaningfully reduces surprises. Larger or older schemes may separately commission a formal capital works or maintenance plan through their manager or a specialist, which is a bigger exercise than day-to-day maintenance tracking.

What this doesn't cover

Funding preventative maintenance — setting aside a capital works fund, budgeting for large future items — is a budgeting exercise that sits with the full Strata Pages product, not Flex Strata. Flex Strata's role is tracking the jobs and compliance dates that inform that planning, not managing the fund itself.

Where recurring items live

Compliance items with a due date sit in the compliance register; one-off and recurring maintenance jobs sit on the maintenance board. Reviewing both together, rather than in isolation, gives the fullest picture of what's coming.